The Role of Special Education Interest Groups in National Policy ...

of America, The Autism Society), while others target issues that affect people across disability categories (e.g., The Arc, National Easter Seals Society, TASH).³¹ Yet another set of organizations focuses on the concerns of a particular professional group (e.g., school principals, occupational therapists, psychologists, speech pathologists, teachers). There are a little over seventy national groups that have testified before Congress and submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in IDEA cases. These groups are the focus of this study.

General Study Design

This research begins with an identification of national organizations that have testified in congressional hearings held for the initial passage of the act in 1975, or in hearings for its reauthorizations in 1983, 1990, and 1997. The study focuses on organizations that operate at the national level; thus, state-level and local groups were not included in the study. Some general organizational characteristics were examined for each identified group, for example, the year the organization was founded, the group’s resources (e.g., staff sizes of the national office), the year(s) the group testified, number of testimonies, and the organization’s representation in Washington, DC, across time (e.g., whether registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995). Each group’s testimony in the study was analyzed to learn how the group framed its interest. General patterns of advocacy organization activities across the four points in federal legislative passage and reauthorizations were identified from these data. Organizations that submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in cases stemming from IDEA between 1975 and 2003 were identified, and these briefs were coded to examine issue frames.³² I then analyzed the effectiveness of the organizations by examining legislative and court victories over time.

I identified a smaller sample of organizations that represented a range of the key independent variables for an in-depth study of how the groups framed their interests across time, chose policy targets and strategies, and negotiated differences with other groups and with policy makers. A variety